Love In The Asylum

I am in Seattle! Weather is much better than I have been led to believe is possible (and for two days in a row we've been able to see Mt. Rainier, even the natives seem a bit shocked by that). Have looked at rather a lot of art, with a considerable amount of art looming in the future. (Dale Chihuly, still pretty awesome. My phone is full of pictures of glass flowers and Cthulhus. Sunday there will be Rembrandt.) Everywhere I turn there are hipsters on bicycles. Or businessmen on bicycles. Just, bicycles, everywhere (which in and of itself makes me wish I lived here).

I have spent a frankly embarrassing amount of money (by which I mean, any money, at all) on cheese to bring home with me.

You know, in a way it's reassuring. I'm not sure I would know how to adapt to a universe where ludicrously bad things did not happen to or around me every time I travel. It would be weird, to say the least.

Okay, it wasn't as bad as all that. It's just that we got stuck sitting on the tarmac in Los Angeles for so long that I missed my connecting flight to San Francisco. By the time I got off the plane and across the airport to my gate, they'd closed the doors and wouldn't let me on. So I went and made sad faces at the incompetent customer service guy until he put me on the (only) later flight, and then I bummed around the airport for awhile waiting for my new plane and wishing any of the cafes were open. Rough coming into San Francisco, because of all the rain and fog, and it took so long for my suitcase to come I thought they'd lost it (incompetent customer service guy having been somewhat baffled by my luggage tags).

Then had to wait outside in the wet for a shuttle for a half hour - I think I did something wrong here, I'm pretty sure there was a dispatch desk or something I should have checked in at so they could call a shuttle for me. But luckily another group waiting there was going to Stanford too, so when the driver asked around I started waving and shouting and it all worked out okay, in the sense that I got home. At two in the morning. It's a good thing I decided to go in for the shuttle in the first place, because by the time I got my bags and was ready to leave the airport the very last train of the night would already have left, and then I would have been properly fucked.

Remind me never to take an evening flight again.

I've heard that you should spend New Year's doing what you want to being doing in the coming year. If that's true, than in 2011 I have a greater than usual chance of being eaten by a great white shark.

No, I don't know why there was a Jaws marathon either. But my father was in charge of the remote, I couldn't do much about it.

Last night was also the Yuletide reveal! So here is my story:

Title: Lefty Sings The Blues
Fandom: Pancho and Lefty (song)
Recipient: luzula, who asked for more about the relationship between Pancho and Lefty and what happened in Mexico
Warnings: canon character death
Rating: PG-13 ish
Notes: a special thanks to colourofsaying, hand-holder, idea-bouncer, and beta-reader, and my mother, who is an invaluable blues reference.
Summary: A bank robbery, a hide-out, a betrayal. A blues song.

I came really close to defaulting this year, because while I had this story plotted out about two days after I got my assignment, I left the bulk of the writing to the weekend before the deadline. And then the whole thing with my grandfather happened, and I wasn't in any kind of shape to hold a coherent conversation, let alone write a story. But I've been kind of obsessed with the idea of this story since November (ask colourofsaying how many times I've flailed at her about it over the phone), and I didn't want to give up on it. I think I hit 1000 words at 11.57 on Monday Night, and posted a terribly incomplete story just before the deadline hit. And then spent the next several days trying to finish it, culminating in an all-nighter on Thursday. I'm not sure this is the story it would have been if circumstances hadn't been what they were, but I think I'm still happy with it.

My room is looking really empty right now since all my stuff is packed up. Miraculously, I managed to fit my new boots and one of my new cookbooks into my suitcase without running out of room for (most) of my clothes - it probably helps that I am leaving my job interview suit here, since I shouldn't be needing it in California. Leaving for the airport in a couple of hours, and should be back on campus around midnight or so. Wish me luck!

Well, I'm not very bright.

I got the booking confirmation this morning for the plane tickets I bought a few weeks ago for my trip home for winter break, and while I was looking over them to make sure everything was correct I noticed something odd. I remember complaining to my father after I bought the tickets that we were going to have to get to the airport at some godforsaken hour because my flight left at seven in the morning, but the flight listed on my itinerary? 7 PM, not 7 am.

*headdesks so much* I cannot believe I completely failed at reading the time like that. Am I six?

And now I'm going to have to shell out for a shuttle home from the airport, because taking the train after a flight is enough of a hassle normally, but I really don't want to be hanging around the train station by myself at 11 at night on New Year's. THANKS BUT NO.

We are driving down I-5 between Bakersfield and San Jose at 85 mph and we switch lanes to pull around the SUV just in front of us. We pass them and get back in the left lane, and my dad goes to adjust the rear-view mirror just in time to see the SUV, now behind us, veer sharply off the highway and flip upside-down.

So, uh, that happened. We were a bit shaken up, but honestly, near-death is pretty par for the course for roadtrips in my family. I'd be more worried if nothing had happened by now.

Yesterday we drove all the way across Arizona, which I am not overly fond of because they kept closing the roads we were on so that they could paint them or something. Also they only had one rest area in the entire state. We only got slightly lost coming into Barstow, but it was pretty late so we just went straight to our surprisingly not-at-all sketchy hotel and crashed.

Today we drove up the length of California, which went a lot faster than I was expecting. Once you get through Bakersfield and out of the desert and into the hill country, it really is a gorgeous drive. Right now I'm in the mountains between San Jose and San Francisco, staying with an old friend of my dad's. In the middle of writing this I was summoned into the kitchen to see the deer walking through the trees in the front of the house. My dad and his friend are reminiscing about their antics back when they were young and alcoholics; I've mostly been left to my own devices.

Tomorrow I will be back at Stanford. Such a strange feeling, after so long at home. Mostly I am just glad to be done roadtripping.

This is pretty much how I feel every time I travel.

(aside from a two-hour delay in Phoenix on account of our pilot getting lost, this trip was comparatively painless though)

 I had a lot of stuff I wanted/needed to do tonight, like working on my Victorian Lit paper, or my AmLit presentation (which we may or may not do since the professor changed the final requirement). Or, god forbid, working on my Lucifer short story, since I have to gut the middle of it and completely rewrite a main character's backstory and primary relationship. But I was rather stupidly up too late last night reading and messing around, and after a long morning and afternoon of trekking across Northern California, I am too exhausted to even hold my head up. Oh well. I still have tomorrow (and reasonable ideas of what my rewrites will be, and a workable starting thesis for the lit paper).

*curls up in bed with NCIS and leftover apple pie*

I made it to California! And had what was probably the least eventful trip ever, so at least this summer was good for something. I was so happy to see my aunt when I got to baggage claim in Sacremento and it really, really hit me that I WOULDN'T HAVE TO CARRY MY BAGS FOR TWO MORE HOURS. And, you know, yay family. Yay family's tiny fuzzy dog. YAY SHOWER.


And then I had to work a four hour shift doing survey calls for a tiny Christian college. Yeah.

When I said, after the last couple trips went really smoothly, that I wished something would happen just so I'd stop waiting for the other shoe to drop, yesterday was not what I had in mind.

I left my dorm at 7.30, and got to the airport at 10.00. My flight was scheduled to leave at 2.00. No problems so far - despite the giant pile of luggage the train trip was fine, I didn't even fall down the stairs getting off. It was nice not feeling rushed about making my connections, since I was so early. I did get yelled at by one the train attendents because I accidentally grabbed my ticket receipt out of the machine and not my actual ticket, but she didn't throw me off, so whatever. Anyway, after I checked my luggage, I fought a place to sit close to an outlet and watched SGA for a few hours before I went to get lunch and go find my gate. Here is where the drama starts.

I check the flight board t make sure I'm going to the right gate, and it says my flight's been delayed for an hour. That's just great. So now I've got two hours to sit around the terminal instead of one, and it's all full up because there's a different flight waiting to board, so I can't plug my computer anywhere. So I read for awhile, I listen to Star Trek on my mp3 player, I call everyone I know to bitch about how bored I am. I also start to get kind of worried - my flight to Albuquerque is scheduled to start boarding twenty minutes after my flight from SF gets in. And I really hate being the person they are holding the plane for, it's so embarrassing.

So halfway through a conversation with colourofsaying , the guy at the counter gets on the intercom and makes an announcement: the flight's been delayed again and won't be leaving til 3.30. SF's fogged in, or something, and our plane is still in Los Angelos because of grounding orders. Everyone who has a connecting flight, get in line at the counter so they can figure out what the fuck to do with you.

I'm not going to blame Southwest for the delays, since they really can't help fog, but I'm still pissed off at them for how they handled this part. It was an enormous clusterfuck - they had a line going all the way across the terminal, and one (INCREDIBLY SLOW) guy at the desk, trying to take care of everyone. I was in line for over an hour without moving ten feet. I have to thank colourofsaying  profusely, for staying on the phone with me talking about Due South and is probably the sole reason I didn't start throat-punching everyone ahead of me in line.

Five minutes before I got to the head of the line, they got on the intercom again and told everyone flying to Albuqueque to sit down, they were fine, there were two more connecting flights after the one we were supposed to be on. Also the flight was delayed again.

By 4.30 we were finally on the plane and in the air. I got lucky enough to sit next to a nice young couple who didn't mind that I had a metric fuckton of luggage - btw, I also hate the way SW boards their planes, where you don't have an assigned seat, you just fill in the first empty seat you find. It's mind-bogglingly stupid, since what happens is that everyone takes either a window seat or an aisle seat, and you end up with 50 middle seats that are now impossible to get into.

Anyway, here is where this passes from regular bad airport luck to sheer farce.

Halfway through the flight, a teenage boy keeled over in the bathroom.

I still don't know entirely what happened, having pieced it together from whispered conversations with my seatmates and overhearing the flight attendents talking. But more or less, the teenager sitting in the seat of me felt weird and went to the bathroom. His brother went after him; he said he couldn't see or hear and he passed out. Also his blood pressure was really low or something? But regardless, cue medical emergency. The brother is freaking out. The flight attendents are freaking out. They keep getting on the intercom and telling everyone else NOT to freak out. They're running back and forth, getting first aid kits and oxygen and some guy from the middle of the plane who's a doctor. At some point, they actually put an IV into this kid. Everyone in the last four rows (including me) is craning around, trying to see what's going on, or whispering to each other to see if someone else knows what's going on. I am very quietly spazzing out, partly because I thought a kid was about to die five feet away from me, partly because the flight was turbulent as fuck, partly because I had just gotten to the destruction of the Kelvin scene when I turned my mp3 player off for maximum gossip.

In the end the kid was okay - although he probably spent last night in the hospital and I doubt his mom is ever going to let him fly alone again - but we were delayed further at the gate because they had to get him off the plane before we could deboard. At this point it's about 6.20. My flight to Albuquerque was supposed to leave at 4.30.  So they've transferred all of us to a flight that leaves at 7.00 - which means it starts boarding in ten minutes. And of course it is in a completely different part of the airport miles from where my flight gets in.

Cue madcap dash through what has to be one of the most confusingly laid-out airports I have ever had the misfortune to pass through. It's not hard to guess what happened then: my flight from Phoenix to Albuquerque was delayed. Of fucking course.

I was about ready to cry, or maybe just fall over and die right there in the airport, but luckily this is the part with the cute Marine. This girl standing near me while I got my new boarding pass from the desk overheard me ranting on the phone about my trip, and struck up a conversation asking me what happened. Then she said she was flying from San Diego, and the guy in the Marine uniform next to her said he was flying from there too and started talking to us. It turned out she was in the Navy, so they had a lot to talk about, and I threw in my two cents whenever I didn't feel like a total loser jerk for not being a soldier. But they were both about my age, and he was absolutely adorable - very cute looking and sweet, and he was from NC so he had a southern accent, and he was so utterly polite. When we got on the plane he offered to help me with my bags, and when I said I could handle it he ended carrying the suitcase of the woman in front of him, who really couldn't.

And like I said last night, while I was talking to them, the flight at our gate deboarded and one of the guys getting off walked into me, and he looked exactly like Rahm Emmanuel, to the point where I tried to get online last night and confirm that Rahm really wasn't in Phoenix for some bizarre reason.

And that is how I got from San Francisco to Albuquerque in fifteen hours, and why I still think I'm under some sort of curse when it comes to travelling. 

Oh, and one of my jars in my luggage leaked during the trip, so all my pants are now streaked with purple dye.

Moved: five large and heavy boxes containing not less than 120 books, a large number of clothes I never wear, and assorted school supplies and room accesories, like my printer and my desk lamp. Also a refrigerator, a folding chair, and a comforter in a plastic bag. All on my own, but luckily not very far. Stairs are not my friend right now though. Or the passcode doors. But I am a bit proud of myself for managing on my own, and for not getting caught out for not having a sticker for my fridge.

Abandoned to the Aether: one plastic storage crate and the lid from a second, both my laundry hampers (the mesh one because it is dying and the plastic one because I hate it), some clothes I really never wear and never will, and my room fan. The last one is not without some reservation, since it has been a serious lifesaver, but it just did not fit anywhere in my boxes. At least I know I can buy a cheap-ass tiny table-top fan, since I don't need to cool the whole room, just the five feet I happen to be occupying at the time.

Packed: one suitcase (almost nothing but jeans and underwear), one overnight bag (hair/bath products and the most embarrassingly large collection of t-shirts that either say stupid shit or have comic book characters on them), one messenger bag (pajama pants and a large selection of truly random-ass crap, including an umbrella, a bag of jewelry, more hair products, a toothbrush, a pair of flip-flops, and a ninja rubber duck), and one computer bag (computer and accompanying cords, books/comics, and every DVD I own). Luggage also includes my purse, two pillows, and my quilt, all of which I will be dragging by myself halfway across the Bay and through the San Francisco Airport. Have I mentioned that I hate traveling? And that I fail at packing?

Tomorrow is going to suck epically. And since the dorms close at 8am, I have to be out of here at the ass-crack of dawn even though my flight doesn't leave until two in the afternoon. On the up side, this will be very useful in avoiding last year's 'arriving at the airport 10 minutes after my flight starts boarding' scenario. On the down side, 8am. EW.

BUT THIS TIME TOMORROW I WILL BE IN NEW MEXICO.